Hi Nick,
I agree with some of that certainly - I don't believe it's worth
supporting browsers below the stable 4x versions in general, unless
for a specific accessability reason or the like, and for most sites
it's probably reasonable to support IE 5, NS6.1 and later etc.
However the big point is that the site should *work* and be
readable / navigable in commonly available browsers - IE, netscape,
mozilla, opera, safari and konqueror. Anything fully standards
compliant will generally fit that bill... And the above support
things like flash as well. If you're using some experimental
function that may or may not become widely supported, at the very
least it should degrade usefully in unsupported browser. Don't
forget that feature adoption is driven by use - if everyone pushed
nothing but standards we'd have browsers capable of on the fly
SVG rendering by now, which would be nice!
The issue I guess is that while I agree it's cool to try out new
browser functionality, I for one have never found it "cutting edge"
for a site to only work in one persons browser, on one operating
system ;)
cheers,
Toby
P.S. besides, flash is stable enough and supported across
linux/m$/mac/embedded etc to be considered a standard now, and there's
little you can't do in flashMX.
Tuesday, September 2, 2003, 3:09:22 PM, you wrote:
NG> <cf_Soapbox>
NG> So all of our web pages should be viewable any obscure functionality
NG> challenged browser available on the market? To do that would force us to
NG> design aesthetically poor pages and reduce our design options to only a
NG> small core html subset. We couldn't use flash or Java, We couldn't embed
NG> sounds/movies/image maps/etc.
NG> IMO there has to be some room for pages that are cutting edge. If that
NG> cutting edge forces people away because they can't or won't download the
NG> specified browser or plug-in then so be it.
NG> If we as a developer community vowed en masse to never use an unsupported
NG> feature in our pages we'd probably all be out of work very quickly.
NG> One of the reasons the internet is what it is, is because companies (Like
NG> *Gasp* M$) and people are always trying new things out. I really believe
NG> that there needs to be a happy medium here. Service pages like the one that
NG> Westpac provides should allow multiple browsers (Or have multiple versions)
NG> but there should be no reason why companies and people shouldn't be allowed
NG> to stretch the envelope. In stretching the envelope it is often going to be
NG> impossible to add backward compatibility.
NG> </cf_Soapbox>
NG> Well now I've managed to offend y'all, who's gonna win the footy this
NG> weekend :)
--------------------------------
Life is Poetry,
write it in your own words
--------------------------------
Toby Tremayne
Cold Fusion Developer
Code Poet and Zen Master of the Heavy Sleep
Virtual Tours
+61 416 048 090
ICQ: 13107913
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